According to its chairman, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence intends to call Facebook to a public hearing on Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. North Carolina Senator Richard Burr made remarks to reporters on Tuesday confirming the committee’s interest in speaking with Facebook, the Hill reports. “We’re in agreement on a Facebook […]
Mark Zuckerberg has gotten so rich that he can fund his philanthropic foundation and retain voting control without Facebook having to issue a proposed non-voting class of stock that faced shareholder resistance. Today Facebook announced that it’s withdrawn its plan to issue Class C no-vote stock and has resolved the shareholder lawsuit seeking to block […]
Election meddling is Facebook’s next adversary, and it’s got a plan to attack it just like it did with fake news. Solutions to both these scourges come too late to prevent tampering that may have aided Donald Trump winning the presidency — but at least Facebook is owning up to the problem, working with the […]
Facebook failed to foresee how turning user-written interests and employer information from profiles into ad targeting options could turn offensive. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has apologized for the situation, and announced that Facebook will now manually review all ad targeting options. “We never intended or anticipated this functionality being used this way – and that […]
TechCrunch and Facebook are collaborating to bring TechCrunch’s very first Startup Battlefield to Nairobi, on October 11. The pitch-off competition will feature startups from all over Africa in three categories: Productivity and Utility, Social Good, and Gaming and Entertainment. Top notch investors and founders, as well as TechCrunch editors, will serve as judges to pick […]
Facebook has been reportedly working on a video chat device and a smart speaker that would use a new voice interface, to compete against the likes of Amazon and Google in the race to control your living room; and it’s also been testing as a voice search feature for its app. Today, the company’s head […]
Update: Facebook has disabled using the user-reported fields in question in its advertising system until further notice. Update 2: Google has disabled similar functionality in its own ad targeting system as well. (Details below) Facebook automatically generates categories advertisers can target, such as “jogger” and “activist,” based on what it observes in users’ profiles. Usually […]
In a swift response to the news that advertisers were able to target anti-Semitic phrases on Facebook, the social network has shut down “self-reported targeting fields” in the ad system until further notice. It was shown earlier today in a ProPublica report that Facebook’s advertising system gladly surfaced categories like “How to burn jews” and […]
The European Commission is preparing a list of legal options on how to make digital multinationals such as Amazon, Facebook and Google pay more tax, Reuters reports. The paper is being prepared for an EU summit taking place on September 29, and will be published by the time the Digital Summit takes place. Pierre Moscovici, […]
Automattic, the company behind the popular open source web publishing software WordPress, has said it will be pulling away from using Facebook’s React javaScript library over concerns about a patent clause in Facebook’s open source license. In a blog post explaining the decision yesterday, WordPress’ Matt Mullenweg said Automattic had hoped to officially adopt React […]